A mouse by any other name

OK, I’m old. I’d never even heard of deadmau5. For those of you who are no more with it than I, that’s the stage name of music producer Joel Thomas Zimmerman. He even devised a cool little dead-mouse-esque logo for himself. That’s it on the right.

A glance should be all you need to understand why Disney isn’t terribly pleased with Zimmerman’s logo. Disney claims that it bears a striking resemblance to its own ubiquitous Mickey Mouse logo. Ultimately, a court will decide if the resemblance is too striking.

I’m on Disney’s side.

That is not to say that some trademark cases aren’t silly. In the early days of Pepsi-Cola, the Coca-Cola company sued on the grounds that—are you read for this?—if you turned the Pepsi logo upside-down and squinted, it looked like the Coke logo.